From Hysteria to Healing Félix Vallotton’s Bon Marché and the Ambiguous Nature of Colour in Fin-de-Siècle Culture

This chapter examines the cultural ambivalence surrounding colour in the late nineteenth century, using Félix Vallotton’s Bon Marché (1898) as a case study. The rapid expansion of artificial dyes following the mid-nineteenth-century colour revolution transformed the visual environment of modern cities, introducing unprecedented chromatic intensity into fashion, consumer displays and the broader visual culture of the period. Drawing on approaches from art history and colour studies, the chapter situates Vallotton’s triptych within contemporary scientific and cultural debates on the sensory and psychological effects of colour. Emerging disciplines such as psychophysiology and experimental psychology associated intense chromatic stimuli with nervous disorders, hysteria and compulsive behaviours such as kleptomania. At the same time, chromotherapy promoted colour as a therapeutic agent capable of regulating emotional and bodily states. The chapter argues that colour is perceived in fin-de-siècle culture as a pharmakon: simultaneously a source of pathological excitation and a potential means of psychological healing.